AFAIK all damage types will get all bonuses that apply to them before they are converted. I could be wrong about this, though.

I thought about this same thing. Problem is, the freezing/chill/shatter effect on Glacial Hammer would be completely nullified by changing it to fire. That's a shame too. You'd basically be left with a fire based heavy strike, but with no knockback or stun.

AFAIK all damage types will get all bonuses that apply to them before they are converted. I could be wrong about this, though.

I thought about this same thing. Problem is, the freezing/chill/shatter effect on Glacial Hammer would be completely nullified by changing it to fire. That's a shame too. You'd basically be left with a fire based heavy strike, but with no knockback or stun.

Yeah, but I was wondering if by acquiring the best +Phys/Fire/Cold/Ele/Wep Ele nodes and weapon ele dmg for everything that you could potentially get a much higher total damage, right?

Using glacial hammer with cold to fire support gem allows for 100% of cold damage to be converted to fire. The cold damage from glacial hammer will get all of the +cold and +elemental/spell damage modifiers before its converted to fire. Its like using ALL of the 'increased' damage modifiers that apply to cold and using them as one large 'More' damage modifier on your fire damage at the end.

Using glacial hammer with cold to fire support gem allows for 100% of cold damage to be converted to fire. The cold damage from glacial hammer will get all of the +cold and +elemental/spell damage modifiers before its converted to fire. Its like using ALL of the 'increased' damage modifiers that apply to cold and using them as one large 'More' damage modifier on your fire damage at the end.

Its not better though..even if you stack cold damage passives...you lose the main reason to use glacial hammer, to freeze enemies and you also lose a link...

Infernal Blow + AOF already gives you 100% fire, now you just slap in some fire damage/wed mods on the tree and on gear(along with IPD stuff), and you got a free extra link because you dont have to use cold to fire gem, which means you can put in a proper DPS gem like MPD or WED or something which increases the dps by a massive amount compared to some cold damage nodes or mods on gear.

And of course, infernal blow also works very well with melee splash, you explode everything on the screen with massive damage, giving you high aoe dps.

The damage on glacial hammer would be much higher than infernal blow, but without the cold damage modifiers that glacial hammer provides, there isn't much reason to use it.

I did the math on a planned build, and I could get insanely high damage by using glacial hammer as opposed to infernal blow.

i find that hard to believe, both gems have 125% damage effectiveness and 76% IPD at level 20, theyre the same apart from the special mods (explosion/freeze), you did something wrong if you managed to get more dps with a GH build where you sacrificed a link to cold to fire and of course passives in cold damage mods(better to get IPD/fire ones since youll increase most of the damage, not just the cold half).

I did these calcs based on 461 average physical damage (with a 2H weapon, after factoring in strength bonuses). Not going to link the build since its going to get changed with the new skill tree changes anyway. Like I said, all cold damage modifiers act as one large 'More' multiplier at the end of the conversions.

This is all based on the assumption that each damage type has all of its bonuses applied BEFORE being converted to the next damage type. None of these conversions factor in attack speed in any way.